Sailing to Sarantium (46 page)

'Ignorant, as I say,' said Strumosus. 'To have followed you in here.'

'They killed two of my men, and your fellow at the gates,' said the
soldier. 'He tried to stop them.'

Kyros shuffled to a stool and sat down heavily, hearing that. He knew
who had been on gate duty. Short straw on a banquet night. He was
beginning to feel sick.

Strumosus showed no reaction at all. He looked at the third figure in
the kitchen, a smooth-shaven, very well-dressed man with flaming red
hair and a grim face.

'You are the Rhodian they wanted?'

The man nodded briefly.

'Of course you are. Do tell me, I pray you,' said the master cook of
the Blues, while men fought and died in the dark outside his kitchen,
'have you ever tasted lamprey from the lake near Baiana?'

There followed a brief silence in the room. Kyros and the others were
moderately familiar with this sort of thing; no one else could
possibly be.

'I'm... ah, very sorry,' said the red-haired man, eventually, with a
composure that did him credit, 'I cannot say I have.'

Strumosus shook his head in regret. 'A very great pity,' he murmured.
'Neither have I. A legendary dish, you must understand. Aspalius
wrote of it four hundred years ago. He used a white sauce. I don't,
myself, actually. Not with lamprey.'

This produced a further, similar, silence. A number of torches were
in the courtyard now as more and more of the Blues appeared in
hastily thrown-on boots and clothing. The latecomers had missed the
battle, it seemed. No one was resisting now. Someone had silenced the
dogs. Kyros, peering through the doorway, saw Astorgus coming quickly
across and then up the three steps to the portico. The factionarius
paused there, looking down at the fallen man for a moment, then
entered the kitchen.

'There are six dead intruders out there,' he said, to no one in
particular. His face showed anger but no fatigue.

'All dead?' It was the big soldier. 'I'm sorry for that. I had
questions.'

'They entered our compound,' Astorgus said flatly. 'With swords. No
one does that. Our horses are here.' He stared at the wounded man a
moment, assessing. Then looking back over his shoulder, he snapped,
'Toss the bodies outside the gate and notify the Urban Prefect's
officers. I'll deal with them when they arrive. Call me when they do.
Someone get Columella in here, and send for the doctor.' He turned to
Scortius.

Kyros couldn't decipher his expression. The two men looked at each
other for what seemed a long time. Fifteen years ago Astorgus had
been exactly what Scortius was now: the most celebrated chariot-racer
in the Empire.

'What happened?' the older man asked, finally. 'Jealous husband?
Again?'

In fact, he had assumed that to be the case, at first.

A measure of his success in the dark after the racing and the feasts
had always been due to the fact that he was not a man who actively
pursued women. Notwithstanding this, it would have been an inaccuracy
to suggest that he didn't desire them acutely, or that his pulse did
not quicken when certain invitations were waiting for him at his home
when he returned from the Hippodrome or the stables.

That evening-end of the Dykania revels, end of the racing season-when
he came home to change for the Imperial banquet, a brief, unsigned,
unscented note had been among those waiting for him on the marble
table inside the entranceway. He hadn't needed a signature, or scent.
The laconic, entirely characteristic phrasing told him that he'd
conquered more than Crescens of the Greens in the first race that
afternoon.

'If you are equal to avoiding a different set of dangers,' the neat,
small handwriting read, 'my maidservant will be waiting on the
eastern side of the Traversite Palace after the Emperor's feast. You
will know her. She is to be trusted. Are you?'

No more than that.

The remaining letters were set aside. He had wanted this woman for a
long time. Wit drew him, of late, and her demeanour of serene, amused
detachment, the aura of... difficulty about her. He was fairly
certain that the withdrawn manner was only a public one. That there
was a great deal beneath that formal austerity. That perhaps even her
extremely powerful husband had never fathomed that.

He thought he might discover-or begin discovering-if this was so
tonight. The prospect had enlivened the whole of the Emperor's
banquet with an intense, private anticipation. The privacy of it was
central, of course. Scortius was the most discreet of men: another
reason the notes came; another reason, perhaps, he hadn't been killed
before this.

Not that there hadn't been attempts-or warnings. He'd been beaten
once: much younger, lacking the protections of celebrity and his own
wealth. He had, in fact, long since reconciled himself to the notion
that he was not a man likely to die in his bed, though someone else's
bed was a possibility. The Ninth Driver would take him, or a sword in
the night as he returned from a chamber where he ought not to have
been.

He'd assumed, therefore, that this was the threat tonight, as he
slipped out through a small, locked, rarely used gate in the Imperial
Precinct wall in the cold autumn dark.

He had a key to that gate, courtesy of an encounter years ago with
the black-haired daughter of one of the chiliarchs of the Excubitors.
The lady was married now, mother of three children, impressively
proper. She'd had an enchanting smile once, and a way of crying out
and then biting her lower lip, as if surprised by herself in the
dark.

He didn't often use the key, but it was extremely late and there had
been more need than usual for caution earlier. He'd spent an
unexpectedly intense time in the room the servant had led him to: not
the lady's bedroom after all, though there was a divan, and wine, and
scented candles burning while he waited. He'd wondered if he'd find
passion and intimacy beneath the court mask of cool civility. When
she arrived-still dressed as she had been at the banquet and in the
throne room after-he'd discovered both, but had then apprehended,
through a lingering time together as the images of day were made to
recede, rather too deep an awareness of the same things in himself
for comfort.

That posed its own particular sort of danger. In his life-the life he
had chosen to live-the need for lovemaking, the touch and scent and
urgency of a woman in his arms, was central and compelling, but the
desire for any sort of ongoing intimacy was a threat.

He was a toy for these ladies of the Imperial Precinct and the
patrician houses of the City, and he knew it. They addressed a need
of his, and he assuaged desires some of them hadn't known they
harboured. A transaction, of a sort. He'd been engaged in it for
fifteen years.

In fact, tonight's unexpected vulnerability, his reluctance to leave
her and go back out into the cold, offered a first suggestion-like a
distant trumpet blowing-that he might be getting old. It was
unsettling.

Scortius relocked the small gate quietly behind him and turned to
scan the darkness before proceeding. It was an hour he had known
before; not a safe one in the streets of Sarantium.

The Blues' compound-his destination, honouring a promise to Strumosus
of Amoria-wasn't far away: across the debris-filled, cluttered
construction space before the new Sanctuary, along the northern side
of the Hippodrome Forum, and then up from the far end, with its
pillar and statue of the first Valerius, to the compound gates.
Beyond them he expected to find the kitchen fires burning and a
fierce, indignant master chef awaiting his declaration that nothing
he'd tasted in the Attenine Palace could compare to what he was
offered in the prosaic warmth of the Blues' kitchen in an interlude
before dawn.

It was likely to be the truth. Strumosus, in his own way, was a
genius. The charioteer even had some genuine anticipation of this
late meal, for all his fatigue and the disquieting emotions he was
dealing with. He could sleep all day tomorrow. He probably would.

If he lived. Following a habit long entrenched, he remained
motionless for a time, screened by bushes and the low trees near the
wall, and carefully eyed the open spaces he would have to cross,
looking from left to right and then slowly back again.

He saw no daemons or spirits or flickers of flame on the paving
stones, but there were men under the marble roof of the
almost-finished portico of the Great Sanctuary.

There ought not to have been. Not at this time of night, and not
spread out so precisely, like soldiers. He would not have been
surprised to find drunken revellers outstaying the end of Dykania,
wending their way in the cold through the construction materials in
the square before the Bronze Gates, but this motionless cluster who
thought they were concealed by pillar and cloak and darkness sent a
different sort of message. From where they waited on the portico,
these men-whoever they were-could see the gates clearly, and the
first movement he made from his own position would bring him into the
open, even if they didn't know this small doorway was here.

He wasn't tired any more.

Danger and a challenge were the heady, unmixed wine of life to
Scortius of Soriyya: another reason he lived for the speed and blood
of the track and for these illicit trysts in the Precinct or beyond
it. He knew this, in fact, had known it for many years.

He breathed a quick, forbidden invocation to Heladikos and began
considering his options. Those shadowed men would be armed, of
course. They were here for a purpose. He had only a knife. He could
sprint across the open space towards the Hippodrome Forum, catching
them by surprise, but they had an angle on him. If any of them could
run he'd be cut off. And a footrace lacked ... any sort of dignity.

He reluctantly decided the only intelligent course, now that he'd
spotted them, was to slip back into the Precinct. He could find a bed
among the Excubitors in their barracks-they'd be proud to have him
and would ask no questions. Or he could go to the Bronze Gates openly
from inside, inviting unfortunate speculation at this hour, and
request that a message be carried to the Blues' compound. He'd have
an escort party in very little time.

Either way, more people would discover how late he'd been here than
he really cared to have know. It wasn't as if his nocturnal habits
were so very secret, but he did pride himself on doing as little as
possible to draw attention to individual episodes. Dignity, again,
and a respect for the women who trusted him. He lived much of his
life in the eye of the world. He preferred some details to be his own
and not the property of every envious or titillated rumourmonger in
the bathhouses and barracks and cauponae of Sarantium.

Not much choice here, alas. It was sprint through the street like an
apprentice dodging his master's cudgel, or slip back in and put a wry
face on things with the Excubitors or at the gates.

He really wasn't about to run.

He'd already taken the key back out of his leather purse when he saw
a flare of light on the Sanctuary portico as one of the massive doors
swung open. Three men stepped out, vividly outlined against the
brightness behind them. It was very late; this was odd in the
extreme. The Great Sanctuary was not yet open to the public; only the
workers and architects had been inside. Watching, unseen, Scortius
saw the waiting group of men on the portico shift silently and begin
to spread out, in immediate response. He was too far away to hear
anything, or recognize anyone, but he saw two of the three men before
the doors turn and bow to the third, who withdrew inside. And that
sent another sort of warning to him.

A blade of light narrowed and disappeared as the heavy door was
closed. The two men turned to stand alone and exposed on the porch
amid the debris of construction in windy darkness. One of the two
turned and said something to the other. They were manifestly unaware
of swordsmen spreading out around them.

Men died at night in the City all the time.

People went to the graves of the violently dead with cheiromancers'
curse-tablets, ignoring the imprecations of the clergy as they
invoked death or dismemberment for the charioteers and their horses,
fierce passion from a longed-for woman, sickness to a hated
neighbour's child or mule, storm winds for an enemy's merchant
vessel. Blood and magic, flames flitting along the night streets.
Heladikos's fires. He had seen them.

There were swords across the square, real men carrying them, whatever
might be said about the half-world spirits all around. Scortius stood
in darkness with the moons set and the stars furtive behind swift
clouds. A cold wind blew from the north-where Death was said to dwell
in the old tales of Soriyya, the tales told before Jad had come to
the people of the south, along with the legend of his son.

What was happening on that portico was none of his business, and he
had his own dangers to negotiate through the streets. He was unarmed,
save for the trivial knife, could hardly help two defenceless men
against sword-wielding attackers.

Some situations required a sense of self-preservation.

He was, alas, deficient in this regard.

'Watch out!' he roared at the top of his voice, bursting out from
behind the screening trees.

He drew his little knife as he emerged. Having calmly decided just a
moment ago that he was not going to run he seemed to be running after
all, and the wrong way entirely. It did occur to him-a small, belated
sign of functioning intelligence-that he was being unwise.

'Assassins!' he cried. 'Get inside!'

The two men on the portico turned towards him as he sprinted across
the square. He saw a low, covered pile of bricks just in time and
leaped it, clipping his ankle, almost falling when he landed. He
swore like a sailor in a dockside caupona, at himself, at their
slowness. Watching as he ran-for enemies, for movement, for more of
the accursed bricks-he saw the nearest soldier turn and draw his
sword along the western side of the portico. He was close enough to
hear the sound as blade slid free of scabbard.